googoogjoob

Mutagen is the first Spiderweb remake that I would say is superior to the original game in every respect. There's more to the Shaping mechanics, much of the game's (somewhat lifeless) original script has been rewritten to give it more character, there are a few new zones added, with attendant sidequests. If you're only going to play one or the other, Mutagen is the obvious answer. That said, when you finish Mutagen, you'll probably want to play the rest of the games in the series. And while the remakes of Geneforges 2-5 are presumably going to be similarly improved over the originals, the last of the remakes is not going to be out (assuming Spiderweb maintains a consistent release schedule, which is a safe assumption) until c. 2027 at the absolute earliest (and something like 2030 at the latest). So, unless you're willing to wait that long, you'll probably have to get used to the originals anyway; and it'll hardly hurt to have played the original Geneforge 1 before you've played its remake. So it's ultimately not really a huge deal. Have fun.

You only see explicitly-marked rooms in Avadon for a few Hands in the game, but there are dozens, at least, of off-screen Hands out on missions, and many more are recruited over the course of the series. Similarly, you only interact with a few named Hearts (Miranda, Protus, and later Callan is a Heart), but there are a bunch of unnamed "Heart of Avadon" NPCs bustling around Redbeard, and presumably more elsewhere monitoring different aspects of Avadon's operations. W/R/T Hand competence and temperament- in Avadon 1, Miranda deliberately manipulates things so that your party is made up of the most troublesome Hands, and that you're sent on the missions with the greatest potential to radicalize the protagonist and their companions against Avadon. In 3, you're partnered up with whoever Redbeard could grab, rather than the most appropriate or skilled Hands. In extra-game terms, it's just more interesting for the player character to have conflicted, idiosyncratic companions than blandly competent superhumans.

More books. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde & Other Tales, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson was a deft storyteller, but honestly not that good at spinning out ideas in the way one would want from speculative fiction, I think. Translation State, by Ann Leckie. It's the new Ann Leckie book. Cozy small-scale space opera drama. I liked it. Good ideas, and central conflicts which have obvious real-world parallels and resonance, but resist reduction to 1:1 allegorizing- excellent, exactly what I think speculative fiction should be. Something that struck me, though, is that though the book has three viewpoint characters/protagonists, from wildly differing backgrounds, they're all very Ann Leckie Protagonist Characters: practical, humble, reserved, a wry sense of humor, no shades of malice to any of their actions. They're likeable, of course, but perhaps not differentiated enough. Van der Graaf Generator: Every Album, Every Song, by Dan Coffey; and Peter Hammill: Every Album, Every Song, by Richard Rees Jones. Track-by-track overviews of the discographies of the named artists. Hocus Pocus Focus: The Strife & Times of Rock's Dutch Masters, by Peet Johnson. An impressively thorough and definitive (up to 2015) work on the band Focus, buttressed by extensive interviews with essentially all of the principals. Really good. Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War, by W. Bruce Lincoln. This completes the trilogy started with In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War (which I read in April, but seem to have neglected mentioning here) and continued in Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution. A solid work, minimally dated (written in the 80s). I am glad to have read it. Presently reading Happy Forever, Mark Volman's collage-memoir which recently came out; and then The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton, by Russell H. Greenan.

I think that you seem to want something that's fundamentally at odds with Geneforge's design philosophy. Geneforge uses level scaling for experience because it aims to be relatively balanced- the average player should be at or around level X by point Y in the game, such that the game does not become too easy or too hard, so long as the player is progressing through areas appropriate to their overall progress through the game. But most of the game's maps are optional. It's possible to win the game- to really win it, getting a proper ending- while engaging minimally, if at all, with half the maps. Level scaling on EXP means that most players will finish the game at level 19 or 20 without necessarily clearing every map, and that's what the endgame is balanced for. Further, some maps are heavily slanted towards combat, and some towards noncombat problem-solving, such that not every character is necessarily going to be able to get through every map. Some maps have very desirable loot, and some have important lore revelations. Some are super-hard challenge maps, which, by design, only a minority of players will clear. This- the combination of areas being optional, and areas varying in their challenges and rewards- is deliberate. It makes the world feel like something that exists beyond the bare needs of a video game plot, and it positions exploration and experimentation as interesting things for the player to do. Removing scaling would fundamentally break the game, and undermine these design goals. It would mean that players could reach the endgame at a much, much broader array of levels- and either the endgame would be balanced for the low end of the range, and thus too easy for more thorough players, or it'd be balanced for the high end of the range, and obligate players to clear much more of the map to have a chance at beating it. It sounds like what you want is something like the latter- not necessarily a higher level cap, but a more steady stream of experience spread evenly across the gameworld. But that'd mean much slower levelling (and regular levelling is another Spiderweb design goal), and obligate players to clear much more of the gameworld to have a chance in the endgame (undermining the free-form, open design of the gameworld). If the main or only thing you find rewarding in an RPG is gaining experience at a constant rate throughout the game, I'd recommend you look at the Avadon games instead, as their much-more-linear design means that you gain experience at a more consistent rate.

I guess I have read some more books. Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis. It was alright. As I noted in my previous post, there's sort of a clash between Lewis's MO (an obsessive, materialist documentation of American mediocrity) and the story here (scientific ideals vs the pressures of "real life"). Martin Arrowsmith is a genuine hero, who saves thousands or millions of lives, but most of whose problems are extremely petty and of his own making. The ending of the novel (Martin and his friend bug out to a cabin in Vermont to do Pure Uncontaminated Research forever) aside from being unrealistic, feels like a cop-out from the actual scientific conflicts the novel documents. Border Worlds, by Don Simpson. A weird arty science fiction comic that went through a few fitful incarnations before sputtering out, and then was revived 25-odd years later as a nice hardback collected edition with new material that draws it to a (tentative) close. (This is fine, because it's pretty clear that it was always an aimless experimental sort of thing, and it was never going to have anything like a coherent overall arc or a satisfying ending.) I enjoyed it. The Old Man in the Corner: Twelve Classic Detective Stories, by Baroness Orczy. The first proper "armchair detective"; it takes a superlative storyteller to get away with stories like this, where the sleuth is a passive observer who constructs the course of events from his seat in a cafe, but Orczy was such a storyteller. Something that struck me reading these stories is Orczy's fixation on disguise. Fully eight of the twelve stories here involve disguise and/or imposture, with culprits using these tools to confuse the timeline of their crime, or to lay false trails; two of the other stories also involve issues of identity, though not deliberate disguises. This is of course a theme eminently evident in Orczy's most famous creation, the Scarlet Pimpernel, though it was interesting to see how prevalent it was here as well. The Last Days of New Paris, by China Miéville. Kind of a dud. "Nazis and the French Resistance fight a never-ending war in a warped Paris populated by living Surrealist art pieces and demons" sounds cool, but in practice the book is unmanned by Miéville's shift away from conventional SFF worldbuilding to an "artier," more amorphous "anything goes" approach- it's hard to have stakes when it's not even roughly clear what can or cannot happen. Fanservice is also a problem- almost all of the book's imagery is poached from real-world Surrealist art, to the extent that this novella needs endnotes explaining which works Miéville lifted the stuff from. The result is a book with some intermittently striking imagery, but which is slack and almost absolutely devoid of heft. The Bully Pulpit turned out to be so overstuffed and unfocussed that I've left it on the back burner. I'm currently reading W. Bruce Lincoln's Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War, and a book of stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, and The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce.

Books I have read in the past month: The Bonus Army: An American Epic, by Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen. The current standard work on the Bonus Army, a protest march of unemployed WWI veterans who, at the height of the Great Depression, demanded that the federal government pay out early a bonus that was promised to them. The government responded by sending in the military. The vets did eventually get their bonus, four years later, but nine years before it was promised, and the struggle fed into the passage of the GI Bill of WWII. The book itself was good and thorough, though noticeably written by journalists rather than historians- lots of focus on picturesque detail, not so much analysis of trends or mass forces. World War One British Poets, Candace Ward, ed. My response to poetry is extremely variable. Some of this stuff (eg Owen, Sassoon) was great, some (eg Brooke, Gurney) I thought was pretty bad, and a lot (eg Graves, Hardy) just did nothing for me. World War One Short Stories, Bob Blaisdell, ed. Probably inevitably this is heavily slanted towards British authors. Equally inevitably, it's a mixed bag. Some pieces are excellent- the excerpt from Barbusse's Under Fire; C. E. Montague's "A Trade Report Only"; Somerset Maugham's "The Traitor"; Mary Borden's harrowing, moving "Blind"; Katherine Mansfield's "The Fly." But then there's the maudlin and the facile beside these; and the uncomfortably bloodthirsty "Mary Postgate," by Rudyard Kipling. The BOZZ Chronicles, by David Michelinie and Bret Blevins. This compiles the entire run (six issues) of the short-lived mid-80s comic of the same name. The premise is that the titular character, a thickset, eight-foot-tall pale green alien, is stranded on Earth in the 19th century after his spaceship crashes in England. He is consumed by boredom and ennui on this backward planet. To distract him from killing himself, his self-appointed sidekick, a Cockney prostitute named Mandy arranges for him to solve mysteries. (His other sidekick is an American cowboy, Hawkshaw.) This was very goofy and very fun. It's not really high-caliber as either detective fiction or science fiction, but it's consistently very entertaining. How the States Got Their Shapes, by Mark Stein. A book about how the US's states assumed their modern borders. This ended up being pretty dull. Since it's ordered state-by-state, lots of material is repeated (sometimes three or four times). Since it's about a settler colonialist state, the explanations for borders tend to be "Congress tried to make states roughly the same size" or "a perfectly rectangular shape would've included hard-to-govern land on the other side of a river" or the like. Grim. Great Speeches, by Abraham Lincoln. It's crazy to think that there was a time when the president of the USA gave speeches that were consistently worth paying attention to. Last of the Dragons, by Carl Potts & co. The compiled run of a brief low fantasy comic (evil monks sail to Northern California with their tamed dragons, opposed by an old samurai and a young ninja). It was enjoyable enough, but its brevity means it was too short for niceties like character development or much atmosphere. Civil War Adventure: Books One and Two, by Chuck Dixon and Gary Kwapisz. An odd revival of the war comics format (initially published in 2009 and 2011), and an atypical application of the format to the American Civil War. These were fun, but they inevitably take, basically, the "Civil War enthusiast dad/uncle" perspective- lots of interest in the ground-level experiences of soldiers, little if any interest in the ideological or economic aspects of the war. They veer close to Southern apologia not so much out of actual ideological commitment so much as out of unabashed sentimentality, and typically American fondness for the underdog- these are comics that will show poor white Virginians fighting to "protect their homes," but then also feature a long, almost maudlin story about the Battle of Milliken's Bend, the first substantial action in which Black Union soldiers saw action and proved their worth. So, okay, I guess. Presently reading The Bully Pulpit, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (which is kind of overstuffed), and Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis (which has, I think, an odd mismatch between its subject matter and Lewis's typical form).

You are correct. The "Complete Saga" on GOG includes Avernum 1-3 + Blades, as in the games that came out 2000-04.

More books. Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914-1918, by W. Bruce Lincoln. A solid, thorough account of the period named; while I've read about the Russian Revolution(s) before, what struck me in reading this was how Nicholas's ineptitude and intransigence torpedoed not just the monarchy, but also the chances of basically anyone but the Bolsheviks. His refusal to grant a responsible government in 1915 or 1916 made anyone to the right of the SRs or Mensheviks untenable (the Kadets still wanted to push for Istanbul in 1917!), and this in turn put most of the socialist parties on the wrong foot; only the Bolsheviks ended up having any sense of the moment, or any ability to seize it, in 1917. Anyway, I'm going to read Lincoln's books on the years leading up to WWI in Russia, and on the Russian Civil War, next. The Necklace and Other Stories, by Guy de Maupassant. Maupassant was a master of the short story form- but his stories also regularly come across as shallow and facile to me. Ball-of-Fat is excellent, though. The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, by Toby Wilkinson. Something like three millennia of history; Wilkinson goes for a straightforward political history over the more-typical focus on the ancient Egyptians' religious beliefs and material culture, and succeeds spectacularly. He synthesizes a tremendous amount of (often very fragmentary) material into a strong, coherent narrative. Five Great Short Stories, by Anton Chekhov. Very good; Chekhov could condense a novel's worth of themes and events into a tiny space. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka. Also very good. It's striking how, a century later, Kafka still feels extremely contemporary. Nemesis, by Agatha Christie. I started reading this and then gave up maybe a fourth of the way through. Misery. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco. Not really bad, but I felt like this book tried to do several things at once (detective novel, historical novel, novel of ideas, etc) and didn't really 100% succeed at any of them. It's a likeable book, but not really a great work of art. Currently reading: a history of the Bonus Army, and anthologies of WWI fiction and poetry.

The essence-filled tubing running around the frame indicates that it's Alwan (meaning it's not a chair, it's his support frame thing). Nobody else has anything like it.

It'll run the most recent remakes of Avernum 1-3, Avadon 1-3, Queen's Wish 1 and 2, and Geneforge 1: Mutagen. Spiderweb games where there's no version of the game that it will be able to run are: Avernum 4-6, Blades of Avernum, Geneforge 2-5, and Nethergate. These are all 32-bit, and won't be updated to run on a 64-bit engine. Spiderweb is currently working through remaking the Geneforge games, though it'll be some time before they're all done (as in, several years); and I believe the plan is to eventually remake Avernum 4-6 as well- and perhaps Nethergate. Eventually there should be versions of every Spiderweb game, except Blades of Avernum and possibly Nethergate, that will run on post-Mojave versions of MacOS, but it will be some time before that's the case. There may or may not be hacky ways to get these games working on newer versions of MacOS (via eg emulators). I can't speak to that.

No, unfortunately. You just kinda have to learn by doing; saving often is advised.

Unfortunately, it isn't directly available for download. Nethergate's sounds are "baked in" to its executable, and I'm not sure how possible it'd be to extract the music from it. The music was composed by Bjørn Arild Lynne, a prolific composer for video games (Avernum 4 and Geneforge 4 also use tracks he composed for their title screen music), and the track was probably licensed by Spiderweb rather than commissioned for the game specifically. If you really want to track down the track in question, the best course of action would probably be contacting either him (here's his Facebook page- his standalone website seems to have gone down in the past few months) or Spiderweb (contact page here) and asking them about it.

Books. Oh no. The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom, by H. W. Brands. Pretty good. Relatively breezy; not really a parallel bio so much as the story of the end of slavery in America as related through the acts of two pivotal figures. Not enough detail on Lincoln and colonization, perhaps inevitably. Tolstoy: Selected Stories, by Leo Tolstoy. Alright. Too often straightforwardly moral/allegorical, intermittently brilliant (cf "The Death of Ivan Ilych"). Tolstoy is a guy who I can respect even when I disagree with his particular moral positions, which is not infrequent. The Underdogs, by Mariano Azuela. The Novel of the Mexican Revolution; I found it only intermittently effective; its fragmentary structure and deliberate emotional distance from the characters and events in it were kind of wearying. If Death Ever Slept, by Rex Stout. Another Nero Wolfe novel. This one was pretty haphazard. It feels like Stout himself didn't know "whodunnit" till the last chapter. What Have I Done?: The Stories of Mark Clifton, by Mark Clifton. Post-Golden Age, pre-New Wave science fiction with thematic preoccupations of paradox, psychology, hypocrisy, etc. Some of it fluff, some of it quite good (Clifton won the Cordwainer Smith Award for Unjust Obscurity some years ago). It's sad that Clifton died before being able to develop further as an author, as the later stories are much stronger than the earlier ones. The Great Thinking Machine: "The Problem of Cell 13" and Other Stories, by Jacques Futrelle. Futrelle is famous for the title story here, and for dying on the Titanic. These are fairly barebones puzzle-story-type detective stories. They were entertaining, but Futrelle is remembered for that one story for a reason. The Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories, by Arthur Morrison. Quite good; appearing during the Great Hiatus, Hewitt is kind of a deliberate anti-Holmes, being a brilliant detective who happens to be an extremely normal guy. The Best Dr. Thorndyke Detective Stories, by R. Austin Freeman. The inverted detective stories- a form Freeman invented- are good, especially the first, "The Case of Oscar Brodski." The more-conventional stories here are inconsistent and can feel kinda padded. The Best Max Carrados Detective Stories, by Ernest Bramah. Notable as the first blind detective of fiction; these stories incorporate popular melodrama into detective fiction in a way that has been retrospectively seen as foreshadowing Golden Age detective stories (the first batch of Carrados stories appeared in 1913). Charming, but not all-timers. I am currently soldiering my way through the thorough and very dense "Passage through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914-1918" by W. Bruce Lincoln. I am at last to 1917. They just offed Rasputin. The end is in sight.

The latest remake (titled Avernum: Escape from the Pit, to be unambiguous) was released on both PC and Mac. The differing version numbers between the PC and Mac releases mean different versions of the same game, not that they're different games. There are two reasons the PC and Mac releases have different versions: First, the Mac release came out a few months before the PC release, and it received a patch before the PC release (so Mac version 1.0.1 is (more or less) equivalent to PC version 1.0, and Mac version 1.0.2 is equivalent to PC version 1.0.1). Then, several years after release, the Mac version received an update (version 1.1) to move it to a 64-bit engine, ahead of Apple dropping support for 32-bit programs. So, while the PC release of A:EftP is on version 1.0.1, and the Mac version is on 1.1, they are fundamentally the same game, in basically the same state. Anywhere you buy Avernum: Escape from the Pit- direct from the Spiderweb website, or from Steam or GOG- you'll receive both the PC and Mac versions of the game.

They're absurd. Definitely. Absolutely. I have no idea what methodology VG Insights is using, but the A3 sales number they give is unbelievable. If A3:RW genuinely only sold 15% the number of units A:EftP did, Spiderweb Software would almost certainly be bankrupt. PlayTracker's sales numbers are, similarly, unbelievably high- I wonder if they're basing their numbers on concurrent players/playtime? In which case these lengthy 25-hour-plus CRPGs would have terribly skewed numbers. SteamSpy's numbers are rough, and should be taken with a grain of salt, but, having talked to indie devs about this, I know they're always at least in the right ballpark. SteamSpy shows A:EftP selling 105k copies, A2:CS selling 64k, and A3:RW selling 103k copies. These are eminently plausible numbers. They indicate that A3 is actually still probably the most popular of the trilogy, though not overwhelmingly so- it has a comparable number of sales to the first game, despite having had six less years of being on the market, and six less years' worth of sales and bundle appearances. The influence of the relative features/story/pacing/etc of the games on their relative sales (as in, does 1 selling the most copies mean it has the most appealing story, etc?) is i think kind of moot. For these things to have an influence on the purchase or not of a potential buyer, that potential buyer has to have experience with them before their purchase (or, on Steam, before they decide to refund the game or not); and we simply don't know how many people are playing the demos before making their decision to buy the game or not. There are, I'm sure, people buying A3:RW based on their experience with E3/A3, but I think there are too many confounding factors to think that these aspects have a decisive influence on any given number of consumers. Anecdotally- I've encountered maybe half a dozen people who aren't hardcore Spiderweb fans- and often aren't even CRPG fans broadly- but who played a Spiderweb demo off a demo disc or the like at some point in the 90s/00s. I've never encountered anyone "in the wild" who's played a more-recent Spiderweb game demo without it being recommended to them by word of mouth or a review or the like. Consumer habits have changed radically. The main use of demos these days is as pre-release marketing (cf the "demo fest" type events Steam does regularly), rather than as a way of letting consumers "try before they buy." I suspect consumers today are much more likely to end up owning and playing a Spiderweb game because they picked it up for very cheap in a Steam sale, or got it collaterally in a bundle, than because they were hooked by a demo.

Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not, actually. SteamDB (A:EftP, A2:CS, A3:RW) shows wildly divergent sales estimates for each of the games; VG Insights' estimated sales for 3 are much, much lower than the other estimates (and PlayTracker's estimate of 1.36 million sales is unbelievably high). SteamSpy has 3 selling marginally less well than 1. Exile 3 and Avernum 3 became popular at a time when the shareware model was common and viable, when consumers regularly discovered games via demo discs and the like, and when there were far, far fewer games (both independent and big-publisher) competing for a consumer's attention and money. Their exposure was such that they reached a lot of people who weren't otherwise big into RPGs, or familiar with Exile/Avernum 1 or 2; people who played the demos on a whim or out of boredom and got hooked, who would not otherwise have played the games. There's not much room for that sort of thing to happen again today. There are an incredible number of new video games released every day, tastes have moved on, and game genres are siloed in such a way that it's now much, much less likely that somebody not already interested in CRPGs is going to simply stumble upon A3:RW and play the demo and get hooked. Players new to the series are probably more likely to want to start out with the first game, as well, since the games tell a consistent, linear story between them; absent dramatic shifts in appeal (via radically reworked mechanics or visuals or the like), only series with beefy, publisher-backed marketing campaigns can realistically expect later entries in a series to appeal to a larger audience than people already invested in earlier games. That A3:RW should have done about as well as A:EftP is more likely down to fans of the earlier incarnations of the game buying the new version than to anything else.

Books. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, by Howard Haycraft. A 1941 (updated 1951) history of the detective story up to that date; most of it kind of boils down to a connoisseur's overview of major names from Poe onward, with some essays about the construction and sale of stories, and the relationship between democracy and the popularity of detective fiction. Also, notably, has a list of works Haycraft regarded as essential to a good library of detective fiction. Inevitably this is dated; Haycraft can't really cover the development of the procedural into its own subgenre, or the boom in fusions of the detective genre with others- sci-fi and fantasy, but especially historical fiction, as these happened after 1941, and his discussion notably omits Raymond Chandler, who had only just moved to novels before the book was written. Overall pretty good on its merits. Nightfall and Other Stories, by Isaac Asimov. Sort of a catch-all collection- comprised entirely of material that had fallen between the cracks of earlier collections (up to 1969). This means that the first half of the book, which is ordered chronologically, is comprised of five big excellent stories from Asimov's peak years, and the second half of the book is 15 stories and squibs of extremely mixed quality from the mid-50s on. Humorous Stories and Sketches, by Mark Twain. It's Mark Twain. The earlier pieces in here are a little too immature and broad, I think, but the later ones are great. As unfair as it is, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" is still very funny. With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln, by Stephen B. Oates. A respectable if not definitive popular-audience-oriented bio; published 1977, but not really dated. Being in one packed volume and written in kind of a breezy, almost-novelistic way, Oates has to pick and choose details to relate, and present conclusions but not argumentation; major themes (eg Lincoln's religiosity, or his relationship with his wife, or his difficulties with his generals) get only intermittent development. Very good for what it is, though. The Awakening and Selected Stories, by Kate Chopin. Very good. Chopin was very forward-thinking and perceptive; she was also skilled enough an artist that her work, while dealing with serious topical themes, never lapses into propaganda. Ginger Geezer: The Life of Vivian Stanshall, by Lucian Randall and Chris Welch. A pop bio of a frustrating niche figure; they interviewed essentially every relevant principal, but the book is lacking in analysis or critique- it offers perspectives from the people involved, but avoids making many conclusions of its own. Still, probably the best that can be expected; a better bio, or another bio at all, on Stanshall is not likely forthcoming. The Penguin Atlas of North American History to 1870, by Colin McEvedy. Good, in line with McEvedy's other historical atlases (solid, but somewhat dated, and their scope means that the historical text is necessarily very abbreviated).

The problem I have with The Martian Chronicles is not only, or even primarily, with the literal consistency of the "worldbuilding" per se (which concern is kind of ahistorical, anyway, as the stories were written before an age of SFF franchises and extended universes) or with the varied tone of the stories. The problem I have is the lack of symbolic and thematic coherence. The conceptions of Martian society (and the associated language and imagery) presented in the book vary widely because the stories they are presented in have different thematic preoccupations, and I cannot say that the book has any dominant themes overall- it's a hodgepodge, and I think that any given theme is weaker for appearing in this context. I would contrast this both with Bradbury's antecedents and his successors. Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology contains both much that is frivolous or mundane, and much high-flown idealism and pathos, but everything "pulls in the same direction," towards a nuanced portrait of stifling small-town life. When Walter M. Miller Jr. published A Canticle for Leibowitz (a fix-up of three previously-published stories), he took the opportunity to expand and revise the constituent stories to make the text function better as a novel, including symbolic touches like changing names such that the first abbot's name would start with "A" and the last one's with "Z." But The Martian Chronicles is structurally equivalent to something like I, Robot- it's just a bunch of pre-existing stories with slight new linking material. (It's actually less coherent than I, Robot, though, because Asimov's thematic concerns, while more limited, are more narrowly focused.) Where the stories in The Martian Chronicles work, they work on their own merits, rather than because of their context in the fix-up structure, and I frankly think a story like "The Long Years" would simply work better if it weren't sitting next to the painful "The Silent Towns."

I agree with this- where it's applicable; but these things are only featured in part of the book, and they're undercut by other parts of the book. For example- The first three substantive stories in the text portray living Martian society as the narrowminded, (hetero-)normative background for what is essentially an act of sci-fi domestic abuse, where a man quite literally kills his wife's dreams ("Ylla"); as the hidebound, unimaginative background for a satirical farce wherein all the "sane" Martians refuse to believe that humans are anything but insane Martians ("The Earth Men"); and as being the faceless, generically-evil villains in a pulpy "gotcha!" story, who massacre yet another crew of humans in a picturesque way ("The Third Expedition"). As good as the elegiac evocations of long-dead Mars might be, they're pretty radically undercut by the stories that Bradbury wrote wherein he conceived of Mars so very differently- the way that, in the logic of the fix-up, we, the reader, have seen Mars alive, and seen that it was pretty rancid! It's absurd to slot the (very good on its own) story "-And the Moon Be Still as Bright" in right after this trio of stories, with its sympathetic human-gone-native character Spender feeling disgust at the lack of reverence his crewmates show for the dead society of Mars, and going on about how the kind, noble Martians managed to balance science and spirituality and respect their planet, etc. We just saw those Martians in life! And they were living in a comical parody of narrow-minded, xenophobic Cold War America! (In what is perhaps accidentally revealing of Bradbury as an American author, the vanished indigenous Martians are only actually sympathetic once they're almost all dead (and their death is made almost guilt-free, resulting from human disease rather than intentional action), and the book closes with a human declaring that the humans of Mars are now the real Martians.)

Some of the stories in The Martian Chronicles are, I think, genuinely very good: "-And the Moon Be Still as Bright," "Night Meeting," "The Martian," "There Will Come Soft Rains." The problem for me is that these stories have very different thematic preoccupations (eg "-And the Moon Be Still as Bright" has a strong anti-colonialist theme, "Night Meeting" is sort of a sci-fi memento mori, "The Martian" is a primarily psychological story about loss and grief, "There Will Come Soft Rains" is heart-wrenchingly anti-nuclear war, in a way that admittedly rides the line of being maudlin), and don't really have anything to do with each other (Bradbury's conception of Mars changes to fit the themes and effect of each story, so the stories in the collection alternately present Mars as a parody of contemporary narrow-minded American society, a hostile terra incognita, a noble society that collapsed in the distant past, a society of noble primitives that was destroyed by human colonialism, a wild refuge for misfits, etc, etc, etc), and forcing them into the fix-up structure means that the good stories are shoulder-to-shoulder with lame ones (eg "The Earth Men," which is lame satire, or "Usher II," which is a self-indulgent revenge fantasy against prudes and censors, or "The Silent Towns," which takes a potentially haunting premise and uses it to the ends of a sexist farce), so the volume is just all over the place, and ends up being less than the sum of its parts. (Trying to present the book as anything like a coherent future history of Mars is absurd, and saying that they all take place in the same universe over 27 years of future time is laughable.) The thematic patterning necessary for a short story cycle or a multi-perspective novel to "work" artistically is just not present at all- even I, Robot leaves it in the dust. (The structure is so loose that Bradbury was able to remove a story, and slip in two others, in a 1997 edition, without damaging the framework of the book.) I have to assume that the book's continued reputation is down to its initial popularity giving it enough public exposure and pop culture momentum that it's just remained a staple. I can understand its initial popularity. It does show more psychological depth than most contemporary sci-fi (though as noted that's a very low bar), and it deals with themes that are more humanly immediate than the cerebral speculation of a Clarke or an Asimov. It is written in a more artful, readable style than, say, Asimov's bone-dry near-monotone, or Heinlein's almost telegraphic terseness. But on the one hand, it falls short of most of its peers as science fiction per se (it tends towards the realm of allegory and fable, and only "There Will Come Soft Rains" meaningfully deals with the consequences of scientific/technologic development), and in its literary qualities, it's blown out of the water by at least a dozen of the writers associated with the "New Wave" of the 60s, so it's its sustained popularity that's really puzzling.

I would guess a member of the anti-Rentar faction of Vahnatai.

I've read a bunch of books in the past month and a half. Here's what I remember of them. Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. This was, as noted above, dry and heavy going, but readable and consistently interesting. I just wish the edition I got had more maps. The Silent Speaker, by Rex Stout. I had a good time with this book. It's been commonly remarked that Stout brought together the best of "golden age" detective stories (in the character of Wolfe) and elements of the hardboiled story (with Archie Goodwin) in his Wolfe stories, and that's true. It makes for a consistently engaging formula, even when the plotting is a little sloppy. Civil War Stories, by Ambrose Bierce. Remarkably "Modern" (as in, 20th century, at least) in their bitter, brutal approach to depicting war, though still leavened with some black humor and Gothic-tinged dramatic irony. Pretty good. Civil War Poetry and Prose, by Walt Whitman. On the one hand, the way Whitman identifies his own drives and ideals with those of the people of America, and even with the state itself, is kinda weird and uncomfortable. But on the other hand: that guy could really write poems, huh. The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: A Collection of Victorian-Era Detective Stories. Exactly what it sounds like (and this is consciously part of a tradition- I know of at least five other anthologies or series of anthologies using the title and concept). There's a reason most of these detectives are now essentially forgotten, though it's nice to get acquainted with them briefly. The Making of the Middle Ages, by R. W. Southern. A history of the intellectual and organizational developments that characterized Western Europe in the High Middle Ages. Inevitably kind of narrow and fuzzy at the edges, but probably about as good a reconstruction of the medieval mindset as is possible from someone at such a remove. Might as Well Be Dead, by Rex Stout. It's another one of these. Not quite as good as The Silent Speaker, but still enjoyable. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. This is the third, Charles Neider-edited recension of this text. Neider put the fragments in roughly chronological order, but he might as well not have bothered, given how uneven Clemens's recollections are, and how digressive he is. Almost worthless as an actual autobiography, but consistently funny and engaging as a clutch of reminiscences, anecdotes, and personal attacks. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. Most everything I'd read about this book- people calling it a forebear of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, reviews noting the influence of Winesburg, Ohio on it, whatever- made me expect a cohesive short story cycle that was greater than the sum of its parts. Instead, I got an extremely uneven short story collection, which is extremely obviously a fix-up (Bradbury's conception of Mars, and his artistic intent, vary wildly between stories); there's no "greater than the sum of the parts" effect, and the better stories suffer to an extent for being laid down next to the weaker ones. So it was worth it for the good stories, but, well. Bradbury is acclaimed for being more concerned with the psychological and human than his peers. But with peers like Asimov and Heinlein, that is an incredibly low bar to clear; and, frankly, Bradbury isn't as good at documenting the personal or social as his influences (eg Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck), and he isn't as good at incorporating his characters and dramas with their speculative context as would be later writers (eg Walter M. Miller, Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin, Daniel Keyes). The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost and Horror Stories, by Ambrose Bierce. Not as good as the Civil War stories. So flowery and inconsistent in effect that they could've come from a different writer entirely. Some were decent, at least. I have acquired something like 30 new books in the past month. I am only just beginning to devour them. Presently I am reading a history of the detective story, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and a short story collection by Isaac Asimov.

More books. Snakeskins, by Tim Major. A competent but disposable sci-fi thriller that I got, remaindered, for cheap. Forgettable. Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, by Mary Roach. It's another Mary Roach book. Breezy and enjoyable, but inevitably shallow enough that it's not really much more than the briefest of introductions to the subjects covered; the curse of pop science. Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis. Very good. Still depressingly relevant, I think, as a satire on consumerist society and American mentalities. Babbitt is a man who has forfeited all his hopes and ideals and hollowed himself out and become the one of the worst possible versions of himself; he becomes vaguely conscious of this, but then finds it's too late to escape. The book has been criticized for having more blithe, less sympathetic characterization than its predecessor, Main Street, and I think that's true, but also kind of unavoidable. Babbitt is the kind of guy who'd sleepwalk to the Nuremberg rallies because it was the thing to do in his set, and while I don't think the book is devoid of sympathy for him, it's also hard to feel viscerally bad for him as he discovers the truth about the life he's made for himself. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I quit reading this about a hundred pages in because it was so bad I was becoming actively upset with it- something historically very rare for me, but becoming more common as I get older, and less forgiving and patient of books I'm not getting anything out of. It's the stuff I hated about his short stories writ large- the absolute lack of interest in either characterization or plot, the almost exclusive emphasis on setting and tone, the coyness and the casual cruelty. The characters are all either superhumanly obsessive and passionate or superhumanly phlegmatic, and the almost total lack of dialogue, deliberate reuse of names, and recurrent theme of incest or near-incest means that they never feel like real people, as opposed malformed avatars of the same perverse forces. And I'm sure that that's a deliberate effect! It's just also miserable and stultifying to read (and there is no concept of grace here, merely of inevitable degeneration and collapse), especially when it's stretched to 400 pages only rarely broken up by dialogue or meaningful incident. Awful. The Mirror Crack'd, by Agatha Christie. The first Christie novel I have ever read (and the first novel in the five-novel omnibus I got for $5). Not exceptional as a mystery, and pretty uneventful, but Christie clearly had a way with character and dialogue, and a gentle sense of irony, which are endearing. A respectable entertainment. Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor. This is another one I didn't finish- I quit maybe halfway through. It is such a mess- very obviously a first novel. Every so often there's a turn of phrase or a paragraph that's stunning, but those moments are lost in a morass of unbelievable, cartoonish characters, uneven plotting, and stabs at artistic effect that don't land, and it mostly just felt like a series of incidents of rancid people behaving unpleasantly. Currently reading the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, which is a pretty dry and weighty book, but also very readable and even winning.

I doubt this. The Vahnatai are more adapted to the caves than the caves are adapted to them- their large eyes suitable to a low-light environment, their slow metabolisms that let them subsist off of scant meals of fungus and meat, their low rate of population growth and division into widely-spaced tribes, and above all their periodic hibernation to allow the cave ecosystem to bounce back between periods of use, something which leaves them terribly vulnerable for many years at a time, but which is uniquely necessary for a sustainable existence in the caves. I think it's reasonable to conclude that the Vahnatai have manipulated the caverns to make their lives easier- things like brighter glowing fungus, maybe, or faster-sprouting mushrooms- but they and their society are still very narrowly adapted to their environs. (Unless they can engineer themselves to not have to hibernate, or to reproduce faster, or the like, there doesn't seem to be much of an incentive for them to go much further, either.) Thematically, also, the fact that the Vahnatai and Sliths are native to the caves, and adapted to them, while humans and Nephils aren't, is something which is hinted at as early as A2, and becomes extremely important in A6.

There are screenshots and trailers (with gameplay footage) for all of Spiderweb's iPad/iPhone releases on the App Store. Since the games can be played entirely with the mouse on desktop computers, I don't think there's any reason the controls should be very different on a touchscreen.